Much of the web struggled to stay on its feet today, with outages bringing down U.S.-based services and sites such as Amazon, Twitter and Netflix. A massive distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on Dyn DNS is reportedly the cause: as a popular provider of domain-name lookup services, it falling over means that browsers simply don't know where to find websites.

Update :
This attack is mainly impacting US East and is impacting Managed DNS customers in this region. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue. Posted about 2 hours ago. Oct 21, 2016 - 12:45 UTC

Investigating:
Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21st-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.

The City of London is a curiosity; it's the financial district within London proper, and it has its own local government, which is elected by the banks and other corporations within the district. This (literally) corporate-run government then operates its own police force, separate from the Metropolitan Police, with sweeping powers.

My latest Guardian column is "Why did an MPAA executive join the Internet Society?" which digs into the backstory on the appointment of former MPAA CTO Paul Brigner as North American director of the copyright-reforming, pro-net-neutrality Network Society group, which manages the .ORG domain name registry.

I asked Brigner whether his statements about DNS blocking and seizure and net neutrality had been sincere. "There are certainly a number of statements attributed to me that demonstrate my past thoughts on DNS and other issues," he answered. "I would not have stated them if I didn't believe them. But the true nature of my work was focused on trying to build bridges with the technology community and the content community and find solutions to our common problems. As I became more ingrained in the debate, I became more educated on the realities of these issues, and the reality is that a mandated technical solution just isn't a viable option for the future of the internet. When presented with the facts over time, it was clear I had to adjust my thinking.

"My views have evolved over the last year as I engaged with leading technologists on DNSSEC. Through those discussions, I came to believe that legislating technological approaches to fight copyright violations threatens the architecture of the internet. However, I do think that voluntary measures could be developed and implemented to help address the issue.

"I will most definitely advocate on Internet Society's behalf in favor of all issues listed, and I share the organization's views on all of those topics.

Carl Malamud sez, "Paul Vixie tells a real-life action adventure about the DNS Changer and Conficker plagues that are still active on the Internet and how he ended up running a center for disease control in addition to his day job. His day job, in case you're not familiar with isc.org, consists of helping keep the DNS going and as a sideline hosting a lot of important software and services like Mozilla, the Internet Archive, and many others (and a few lightweight low-volume clients like public.resource.org)."

Since the original court order that authorized ISC to install and operate these replacement DNS servers was due to expire on March 9 2012, a new DNS Changer Working Group (DCWG) was formed to handle victim notification and remediation. We had roughly four months to identify and notify half million or so DNS Changer victims, and to help these victims clean up their infected computers. Many victims would have to reinstall Windows on their computers — which at first was the only sure cure for this particular infection. On top of that, many of the victims have had their DSL or Cable modems ("home routers") reconfigured by the DNS Changer malware, so that they were using ISC's replacement DNS servers even if none of their computers are still infected and even if none of their computers were running Windows. Most Internet users do not have the skills necessary to check and repair the configuration of their home routers, and most Windows users are also unwilling to reinstall Windows.